Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Collection of administrative office locations

For some time already I have added the geographical locations of the administrative into the XML files of my Tambon coding project. Now I have programmed a simple conversion of these XMLs wit locations into a KML file used in Google Earth, so I can easily display all the coordinates I have collected already.

In the map below is always the current version, which at the time of writing includes

Province halls (blue marker), 65 out of 75

District offices (green marker), 591 out of 927 (including those in Bangkok)

The placemarks right now have no contents except the coordinates, unlike the one from an earlier experiment where I embedded photos and Wikipedia links, but for now I have concentrated on the essential things.

Quite obviously the coordinates are for from complete - for the district offices I have locations for all and only omitted those where Google Earth has no hires data yet to verify the accurate location. But especially for the municipalities and TAO these are quite difficult to find - some are from WikiMapia, for Samut Prakan Richard Barrow collected a few, rarely the website of the local government unit has a decent map which allows the identification in Google Earth.

So I can only call everyone interested to help making this collection more complete. You can send me any addition or correction by email, or if you have a lot and don't mind the XML editing you can join in the coding project and edit the XML yourself.

Thanks, fixed - I thought the municipality has a more representative office, but seems I instead picked one of the school buildings. If you spot more, best give me the corrected coordinates instead of describing the location, in this case 19.9092 N 99.8268 E.

A GPS receiver is of course best because then you could even pinpoint places where it has no hires satellite imaginary in Google yet. But the easiest way is: Start Google Earth, click the "Add Placemark" button and move it till it points on the building, and then numbers in the Latitude and Longitude edit fields.

I discovered that if I go to a point on your map, right click, then choose "what's here" from the resulting menu, then the spot I clicked upon becomes a green arrow, and google puts a red balloon over some nearby spot it can identify, a road, for instance.

At this point there is a hide/unhide bar at the bottom of the left hand panel where the list of all the place markers is, and unhiding it shows the co-ordinates of the spot the green arrow is pointing to.

My house is at (19.90681, 99.831073), more or less perhaps with more precision than accuracy, in the heart of the farang ghetto.

Changwat, Amphoe, Tambon

Everything about the administrative subdivisions of Thailand - history, current news, facts hardly found in English, reviews of corresponding books, the Wikipedia coverage of these entities...

Feedback of all kind is very welcome, either by public comments at the corresponding posting, or also by private email. Comments only posted to spam or containing anything which might give me legal problems in Thailand will be deleted.